Monday, January 08, 2007

What more can I say? I honestly feel bad for Ohio State. They are a great team that had a lot of bad luck and didn't know how to respond. It reminds me of when Florida got thumped by Nebraska in 1996.

But forget Ohio State. This is all about The Gators. Chris Leak goes out on top of a historic career. Who wants to claim that Michigan deserved to be there instead of Florida now? I had to listen to so much pre-game hype about how much better Ohio State was than Florida. This was supposed to be a coronation of King Troy Smith, and instead he got destroyed. The Florida pass rush was devastating. It seemed like Ohio State thought they would control the line of scrimmage (they're the bigger, stronger team, right?) and that Florida would have to blitz to get pressure. Wrong!

Florida's offense benefited from lots of great field position, but also from a tentative Ohio State defense that played a ton of zone. They were too obsessed with not giving up the big play that they let Florida do whatever they wanted to offensively. Maybe that could have worked if Florida would not have been playing on the Ohio State side of the field all night. I thought that Ohio State might be vulnerable because they would be overconfident and conservative on offense, but it was actually on defense where this happened.

So Florida reigns supreme, both in basketball and football. That's never happened before. I think it really shows the importance of coaching.

Finally, I hope that Ron Zook takes some pleasure in tonight's victory. A lot of The Gators were recruited by Zook, especially Chris Leak. The team definitely has a lot of guys recruited by Urban Meyer, and he deserves all the tremendous credit coming his way. But Zook was a great recruiter, and all the Gator Nation should feel a debt to him tonight.